


Wanna feel alive, outside I can't fight my fear

by vendettadays



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode 9 Ending Fix-It, F/F, Fix-It, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27008740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vendettadays/pseuds/vendettadays
Summary: Jamie goes back to the one place she never wanted to set foot in again. She goes back to Bly. Willingly, with no choice, but to follow the past back to the place where it all started.Because she wakes to an empty bed.No Dani.Just a note.I want peace.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 12
Kudos: 187





	Wanna feel alive, outside I can't fight my fear

**Author's Note:**

> I tend to avoid horror, but for some reason on a Saturday, home alone, during the day, I decided to watch tHoBM despite my obvious misgivings. 9 hours later and I am devastated, so completely drained. It's been 5 days and I'm still processing. 
> 
> I really hadn't expected to write anything for them. But it was this interview with Amelia Eve that catalysed this: [here. ](https://animalwhispererr.tumblr.com/post/631891335120666624/haunting-of-bly-manors-amelia-eve-reveals-a)It was her answer to the fourth question, and I was like, that's it I can't, so here is this. Thank you for reading and sharing in my pain for the gardener and the au pair.

Jamie goes back to the one place she never wanted to set foot in again. She goes back to Bly. Willingly, with no choice, but to follow the past back to the place where it all started. 

She takes the first black cab she sees, flags it down outside the flower shop they had built from scratch. Cultivated from a single seed into a sapling. Like parents they watered and fed and loved it, tending it into the tree it is now. In the act of cherishing, they learned to be gardeners together. Jamie flags the cab and throws herself inside. 

The address falls from her lips to a confused stare. No one knows about Bly. The little village two hours outside of London, in the county of Essex. The cabbie drives her anyway. Takes the hundred pounds she offers with a shrug. 

She chants over and over and over again. The same phrase runs in her head like a broken record. It accompanies her past the grey streets of an early morning London, past the trees lining the motorway, and past the fields in the country. 

She chants and she chants and she chants. 

It’s you. It’s me. It’s us. 

The cab hasn't even stopped and she jumps out, feet landing on the gravel drive. She runs to the lake, feet sliding against wet, overgrown grass. The rose bushes still stand, bare and flowerless. 

Her body protests against the cold, but her heart and soul drives her forward. 

She wades into the water. 

Shivering.

Numb. 

She grits her teeth and carries on, because she woke up to an empty bed. Alone in their little flat above the shop. The flat they took apart and put together piece by piece. The flat where Jamie had learned to plaster the walls. Badly. The flat with the hardwood floor they sanded together. Poorly. The flat overflowing with plants, living and thriving, safe and completely theirs. 

But she woke to an empty bed.

No Dani. 

Just a note. 

_I want peace._

So she goes back to Bly without a thought. She doesn’t even change out of her pyjamas. Her brown flannel shirt over a black tank top is no match for the dip in temperature. Her grey joggers and trainers unsuited for the slide of autumn into the frigid grasp of an early winter chill. 

She dives head first into the lake. 

It’s October. 

It’s freezing. 

But she feels none of it as she kicks her feet. She swims with manic strokes down to the bottom of the lake. 

She screams and screams.

And she screams. 

It’s you. 

It’s me. 

It’s us. 

But all that replies is water filling her lungs. 

The cold dirty lake, home to so many bodies of the past. Home to secrets and pain and heartache. 

Home to Dani Clayton. The love of Jamie’s life. 

But all she can see in the green water, at the bottom of the lake with her warped and foggy and unfocused vision is an odd shape, coloured a vibrant red. Like the dress Dani liked to wear on their annual Valentine’s dates. 

It is a shape she cannot touch, no matter how far she swims down, no matter how hard she kicks her legs, no matter how far she stretches the fingers of her hand. It is like the very water itself is resisting her, pushing her backwards. 

Her lung screams for air, filling with the unforgiving bite of icy water. 

It starts then as the corners of her vision blur, growing darker at the edges, mind dulling as each kick hits a little less harder, each stroke of her arms a little weaker. 

Jamie feels something wrap around her waist, two arms and two hands and she twists and screeches into the water. 

‘No! No, No, No!' 

She jerks her head side-to-side, back and forth, but whatever holds on only holds tighter. The shape beneath, the shape of Dani on the lake bed grows foggier as she floats to the surface, pulled up by whatever has caught her in its grasp. 

Her head breaks the surface and she gasps, loud and desperate for air as she coughs and chokes water up from her lungs. Sobs escape her, shrill and ugly and so full of pain that with each breath of air and each cough of water it only hurts more. 

'Are you crazy Jamie!?' 

Jamie freezes at the sound of her name. Her eyes sting with tears, all the while her tired legs tread water of their own accord. 

In the freezing water of this haunted lake, she registers the arms around her waist. She recognises the pink cashmere jumper she bought as a Christmas gift one year. Now sodden with lake water, ruined and unsalvageable. 

( _Poppins, when I think of pink, I think of you._ )

She sees the simple gold band, simple on the outside with a declaration on the inside. The one she picked out years and years ago, and worn on the ring finger of a left hand. 

( _I can't wear it on my right. I can't, not after, not after..._ )

She feels a shuddering breath, hot and close, but very much alive against her chilled neck. 

Jamie clenches her eyes closed. Her heart beats a staccato rhythm in her chest as she is dragged to the shore, hauled out of the water and onto her back against the mud and grass of dry land. In the darkness behind her closed eyes, those arms never leave her waist, the body pressed against her side shakes and shivers. 

The arms unwind, slowly and surely, and she feels quivering, frozen fingers on her face as chilled palms cup her cheeks. 

'Darling, look at me? Open your eyes, please?' 

The lilting accent tears a cry from her raw throat and her chests heaves with broken sobs, sharp and unrelenting. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t, but she opens her eyes anyway.

And Jamie breaks down again, right there on the mud and grass of the Bly Manor estate, right by the lake that should have been the watery grave to a lady who’d held onto the world by sheer willpower alone. The tears run and mix against the freshwater on Jamie's face as she stares up at Dani's pale visage, eyes wide and watery, nose pink with cold and erratic breaths misting in the air. 

'Dani?' It's an exhalation of disbelief, the beginnings of grief suspended for a moment between hope and despair.

The hands on Jamie’s face press harder and the thing that looks like Dani leans down, and it takes everything in her not to capture those lips. So familiar, but were they the same? It takes her digging her fingers into the dirt to stop her touching Dani at all. 

Because this is Bly.

It should have been over, but this is Bly. 

The truth of it is that unspeakable, unbelievable things had happened at Bly. 

And Jamie cannot bear the truth. She cannot bear for her fears to be right. If she reaches up and her fingers don't meet the planes of Dani’s cheeks, or brush along the delicate line of her jaw, or along the bridge of her nose, she isn't sure she will survive. 

'Please don't do this,' she begs, teeth biting hard on her bottom lip that she tastes blood before she feels the sting of breaking skin. 

'It's me,' whispers Dani. 'It's really me.' 

The thing that shares Dani's face smiles tremulously down at her. The thing that has Dani's voice speaks, voice growing stronger despite the shaking of her body. 'I'm Dani Clayton, it's 2004, I'm at Bly. I'm married to Jamie Clayton, we've been married for fifteen years, legally for less than one, and you're the love of my life.' 

Jamie's hands unclenches from the earth and with muscles trembling, she reaches up. The moment Jamie's fingers slide into wet, blonde hair, she sees Dani Clayton, free of fear and able to feel, wholeheartedly and truly in front of her. 

'I'm okay. I'm not going anywhere.'

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream at me [here](https://flyfromreality.tumblr.com/)


End file.
